David Carter

MojoKid writes: Intel has officially launched its Skylake-X processor offering in response to AMD's Ryzen Threadripper series of desktop CPUs.The new Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X are 18 and 16-core configurations respectively, with 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz base clocks and 4.4GHz max boost clocks.Both chips support Intel HyperThreading, with 36 threads of processing for the 7980XE and 32 for the 7960X, while both also have 44 lanes of PCI Express connectivity and support for DDR4-2666MHz memory.Both chips also utilize Intel's X299 chipset platform and are LGA 2066 socket compatible.The Core i9-7980XE has 24.75MB of shared L3 cache, 1MB of L2 cache per core, and a TDP of 165W.The Core i9-7960X's details are essentially same, though two processor cores and the cache associated with them have been lopped off.

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Engineering has received a grant to provide scholarships, mentoring and internship opportunities to academically-talented, low-income engineering undergraduates.Students from low-income households will be encouraged to apply for the scholarship program based on their high school grades and ACT or SAT scores."Our programs, including this new one sponsored by the National Science Foundation, provide a clear path to the upper middle-class and beyond for our students."The UIC College of Engineering designed the new program in response to growing evidence suggesting that students from low-income backgrounds have lower graduation rates and are less likely to find jobs in their respective fields than their peers from higher-income families."Students who are the first in their families to go to college don't have parents that can talk to them about what it's like going to college to prepare them for the experience, and those parents are also often at a loss when it comes to providing guidance on finding a job in their child's chosen field," said Darabi, who is also the principal investigator on the grant.In addition to providing scholarships toward tuition estimated to average $5,000 per student, scholars selected for the program will participate in activities in the summer before their first fall semester at UIC.

I am excited to announce a very special and personal contribution to the consolidation of the marketing technology landscape: ion interactive, the company I co-founded and served as CTO, has been acquired by ScribbleLive.ScribbleLive is the first of its competitive set to make a major bet on interactive content.I expect others will follow, but the acquisition of ion gives ScribbleLive a big lead.Of course, I’m thoroughly biased on this.First because I’m proud of what we developed at ion, and second because I’m now a not insignificant ScribbleLive shareholder.But if you’ll indulge my bias for a few paragraphs on this occasion…

Earlier this year, hundreds of companies began to publicly flee participation in the alt-right website Breitbart’s marketing network.But in a new lawsuit, Uber claims that its contracted advertising agency fraudulently continued to place ads on Breitbart, and the case seems poised to rock the seedy world of digital ads.Considering the fact that Breitbart honcho Steve Bannon called his website “the platform for the alt-right,” many advertisers understandably didn’t want to be associated with it and by June the site reportedly had lost almost 90 per cent of its sponsors.According to the lawsuit that Uber filed in a California court on Monday, the company instructed its mobile advertising agency Fetch to remove all of its promotions on Breitbart, but the ads continued to be displayed.Rather the number of installations supposedly attributable to mobile advertising decreased significantly, while the number of organic installations rose by a nearly equal amount.”The key thing to understand here is that Uber is relying on Fetch to report which ads directly led to an installation of its app following a user’s click, and it relies on Tune to go through the transparency reports.

Everyone will tell you, don't go into business with a friend, a relative, or your lover.But of course, many people do it anyway and you hear their horror stories in online forums like Quora or Reddit.If you're thinking about going into business with a friend, relative, or a lover - please for the love of Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, read THIS first.This article covers questions and thinking points to the likes of - how to vet if someone will be a good partner/founder before going in too deep TO handling confrontations.Any words of wisdom from those that have survived the carnage or still are doing it as a dynamic duo?

However, speaking to The Drum ahead of the Singapore leg of the 2017 season, new executive director Zak Brown and CMO John Allert, remained bullish that the McLaren brand is round the corner from gaining former sporting glory.At the management level, McLaren Technology Group founder Ron Dennis, who retired as team principal and handed over his duties to Martin Whitmarsh after Hamilton's win, came out of retirement five years later to launch a coup to sack Whitmarsh for mediocre performances on the track.Dennis, who led McLaren to 10 drivers' titles with Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Hamilton, and seven constructors' championships, was then ousted by majority shareholders after falling out with them and was removed as chairman and chief executive.It was a similar story on the track as an unprepared Honda, replaced Mercedes as McLaren engine partner in 2015, but performances dropped even further, resulting in the team losing million-dollar sponsorships from Hugo Boss, Santander and Johnnie Walker, in addition to headline sponsor Vodafone.However, Brown is quick to add his belief that because McLaren has a long and illustrious history of winning, the brand has not been permanently damaged.“You can market around year-by-year, up and down sporting success, not everyone always wins, but we have gone too long without our track success,” continues Brown.

Small sized phones are nearly extinct in the modern age and only very few phone makers are still making these dinosaurs.And when they do it’s almost exclusively ultra budget models with pretty basic hardware.At least the design can sometimes catch your eye, like today’s newly released Homtom HT26.The anti-slip surface with frosted texture and uneven diamond patterns is the most interesting thing about the phone, because otherwise it got pretty carved out, especially in the display department.MT6737 is still fairly okay budget processor even paired with ony 1 GB RAM and 8 GB ROM, but giving the small 4.5-inch display only FWVGA resolution (that’s 854×480 pixels) doesn’t feel very much on par with 2017.The battery capacity is 2300 mAh, cameras 8MP+5MP and at least it gets the latest Android 7.0 as the OS.

According to The State of Data in Travel Survey 2017, 65% of travel businesses now have a dedicated data analysis team, with 75% of these businesses expecting to increase their data analytics budget this year.As it stands, much of the available data is unstructured and requires some wrangling before it can be used to shape decisions.Bringing this all together into one reliable data warehouse requires a lot of investment, particularly for larger companies which depend on legacy technologies for customer loyalty data, complaint logs, and flight operations.French national railway company SNCF deals with over 90 terabytes of customer data per month, but these are the quantities of data required to understand customers’ behavioral patterns.If we look at the figure below, we can see that there are severe limitations to the quantity of data each team is gathering and using to shape the customer experience at the typical travel company:This reveals how far the industry has to go, but progress is being made.

Sony’s pre-Tokyo Game Show PlayStation press conference is happening right now, and the company has announced a bunch of new Japanese software for PlayStation VR.A Zone of the Enders title called Anubis Mars is probably the biggest news for longtime PlayStation fans; the original ZOE was a mech-fighting game developed by Konami for the PS2 and famously bundled with a demo for Metal Gear Solid 2.Far more importantly, however, is the announcement of Neko Atsume VR.Literally nothing other than the logo was shown off, but it’s hard to imagine virtual reality cat-collecting being anything less than wonderful.Meanwhile, Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun is producing a news app for PSVR that will provide 360-degree video content, much like organizations such as The New York Times have done for mobile VR headsets.It remains incredibly difficult to buy PSVR in Japan nearly a year after it was released, but Sony does seem to be persevering with the flow of content aimed at its home market.

SoftBank Group has agreed to be a cornerstone investor in the initial public offering of ZhongAn, China’s first online-only insurance agency, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today.SoftBank Group will buy a 5 percent stake in the company, or about 72 million shares, at the offer price, which is in the range of HKD $53.70 to HKD $59.70 per share.If calculated based on the range’s mid-point price of HKD $56.70, that means SoftBank Group’s stake would be worth about HKD $4.08 billion, or $522 million.Under its agreement with ZhongAn (also called ZA Online), SoftBank Group can choose to acquire the shares through one of its wholly-owned subsidiaries or affiliates, including the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, which is currently making waves in the venture capital ecosystem by going on an unprecedented funding spree.A SoftBank Group representative, however, said the firm cannot comment on how many shares, if any, will be purchased through the Vision Fund.If all shares are sold at the mid-point of the offer price range, that means the company’s proceeds would total about HKD $10.9 billion, or $1.4 billion, after deducting expenses related to the offering.

MalachiK shares a report from the BBC: Data about British people "may potentially have been accessed" during the data breach at the U.S. credit rating firm Equifax.The UK arm of the organization said files containing information on "fewer than 400,000" UK consumers was accessed in the breach.In a statement, the UK office of Equifax said an internal investigation had shown that data on UK consumers was accessed during the hack.It said data on Britons was being held in the U.S. due to a "process failure" which meant that a limited amount of information was stored in North America between 2011 and 2016.The information held included names, dates of birth, email addresses and telephone numbers.No addresses, passwords or financial data was involved.

MountainLogic shares a report from CNN: President Trump has stopped the takeover of an American chip maker by a private equity firm with ties to China.The deal, which would have seen China-backed Canyon Bridge Capital Partners acquire Lattice Semiconductors, was blocked over national security concerns."Today, consistent with the administration's commitment to take all actions necessary to ensure the protection of U.S. national security, the president issued an order prohibiting the acquisition," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement Wednesday.The national security risk included "the potential transfer of intellectual property" to the Chinese-backed company and the "Chinese government's role in supporting this transaction," according to Mnuchin's statement.Those are sensitive matters: the Trump administration launched an investigation last month into whether China is unfairly getting hold of American technology and intellectual property.The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews deals that could result in a foreign entity taking control of an American company, had previously recommended halting the deal.

An anonymous reader writes: Organized labor doesn't rack up a lot of wins these days, and Silicon Valley isn't most people's idea of a union hotbed.Nonetheless, in the past three years unions have organized 5,000 people who work on Valley campuses.Among others, they've unionized shuttle drivers at Apple, Tesla, Twitter, LinkedIn, EBay, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, Cisco, and Facebook; security guards at Adobe, IBM, Cisco, and Facebook; and cafeteria workers at Cisco, Intel, and, earlier this summer, Facebook.The workers aren't technically employed by any of those companies.Like many businesses, Valley giants hire contractors that typically offer much less in the way of pay and benefits than the tech companies' direct employees get.Among other things, such arrangements help companies distance themselves from the way their cafeteria workers and security guards are treated, because somebody else is cutting the checks.

After three years of Apple products, Target is moving to Android devices for stocking, pulling items, and other essential sales floor duties.Target first outfitted its employees with Apple products in 2014, replacing PDAs with iPod Touches.Gizmodo reports: In Fall of 2016, Target stores began testing the Zebra TC51, which runs Android 6.0 Mashmallow and was confirmed to Gizmodo as "the new MyDevices for store team members chainwide" by a company spokesperson over email.On Reddit's r/Target page and the unofficial employee forum The Breakroom, the new devices have been met with enthusiasm -- and plenty of jabs at the old iOS scanners."The current iOS my devices we have all sorts of issues, connection issues, scanner issues, and tons more," one Breakroom poster complained.On Reddit, a former store manager wrote that "the iPod hardware they used as on the floor scanners for employees died quickly and there was no way of swapping in new batteries.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A house in Sunnyvale just sold for close to $800,000 over its listing price.Your eyes do not deceive you: The four-bed, two-bath house -- less than 2,000 square feet -- listed for $1,688,000 and sold for $2,470,000."I think it's the most anything has ever gone for over asking in Sunnyvale -- a record for Sunnyvale," said Dave Clark, the Keller Williams agent who represented the sellers in the deal."We anticipated it would go for $2 million, or over $2 million.But we had no idea it would ever go for what it went for."This kind of over-bidding is known to happen farther north in cities including Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mountain View.

Asus has unleashed an impressive array of laptops and 2-in-1s upon the Australian people today.Amongst them is the ROG Zephyrus GX501, a sleek gaming machine with a clever twist.The ROG Zephyrus is officially “the world’s thinnest gaming laptop powered by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080”, and it truly is thin at just 17.9mm.To allow for the added heat this top-of-the-line GPU produces, the chassis of the Zephyrus cracks open when you lift the laptop’s lid to ventilate the innards.This premium kit comes at a cost though, starting at $4,999 this is certainly a laptop for the hardcore gamers with hardcore wallets.You can grab it now from Mwave here, as it seems to be out of stock at the official Asus Store.

A wave of uncertainty washed over me recently.Is our marketing team working on the right things?If we halt all our current projects, would our KPIs nose-dive?Then I started seeing a trend in our weekly standup meetings: everyone was being productive, but no one was focused directly on our North Star metric.There’s a simple explanation: without focus and structure, important loses the daily battle with urgent.We casually abandoned our system for setting ambitious, measurable goals and staying accountable.

The maker of top UK biscuits like the Rocky, Crunch Creams and Party Rings has tapped Together as its lead agency.Fox’s Biscuits has hired the agency to lead its strategy and creative, including digital, social, in-store, advertising and PR.Leading this drive is a refurbishment of the brand which will culminate in the launch of a new website this month.Further to this, it is looking to develop social creative, strategy and a series of PR campaigns.Kate Needham, head of marketing at Fox’s Biscuits, said: “Together have shown us that they really get what’s next for the brand, demonstrating how we can build our ‘Lovingly baked’ proposition into something that’s emotive, family-friendly and relevant to our consumers.“At Fox’s we’re very excited to see how our new look and feel is received, but most of all, we’re looking forward to being known for what we do best: baking beautiful biscuits for British families.”

For B2B SaaS companies, conventional wisdom says that Facebook advertising is not a viable customer acquisition channel.This probably has to do with the misconception that people on Facebook are either not business users or not in a “business” mindset when using Facebook.But the data contradicts that intuition.Facebook has 2 billion users who spend 50 minutes using FB per day.Over a fourth of the world surely includes many business users, and it’s unlikely those users are not in a business mindset since the average Facebook user spends so much of their day logged on.And in addition to macro-level data, our own experience managing Facebook advertising for several B2B SaaS companies indicates that driving results with Facebook advertising is very much possible.

Finland's department store Stockmann signed an agreement with ePassi, a mobile payment company in Finland, to formally introduce Alipay as a payment method in the department store.Anna Salmi, chief customer officer of Stockmann Group, said that Alipay is not only a payment method, but also represents a method to attract Chinese tourists.This service will first available at Stockmann's flagship store in the center of Helsinki and gradually expanded to all Stockmann department stores across Finland.They may also expand it into their department stores in Baltic countries.Stockmann has eight large department stores in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia.Chinese tourists have become the second largest foreign consumer group for Stockmann, following Russian tourists.